Employers of various types and sizes employ non-routine labor for a wide range of needs. For example, many hospitals employ a core staff of nurses that work a baseline number of hours year-round. However, patient care demands do not remain constant throughout the year. Moreover, there are routine seasonal events, such as cold and flu seasons, vacation demands coinciding with school vacations, and holidays that cut into the available core workforce. Accordingly, many employers, such as hospitals, draw from pools of contingency labor to staff their business according to these variations. Other types of employers, including many from the construction and food service industries, draw solely from non-routine labor pools, scheduling workers to fill shifts as work becomes available. However, several deficiencies exist with the manner in which such non-routine labor pools are operated and utilized.
Worker demand is difficult to accurately predict. Many prior art systems and methods of staff scheduling employ one or more managers who staff certain work shifts based on their recollections of the employer's needs and deficiencies in past years. More often than not, this results in a staffing surplus or deficiency, either of which being costly to the employer. A better gauge is needed to assist in determining an employer's worker needs for particular times of the year. Moreover, the staffing of a large workforce by one or more individuals may become chaotic at times, resulting in human errors, let alone the waste of managerial resources that results from delegating the interactive scheduling task to one or more of the employer's management personnel. A self administering system, that is accessible from the employer's place of business, the worker's homes, and many places in between is crucial for creating an efficient and effective staffing solution that limits an employer's hands-on involvement.
Many prior art methods of staffing non-routine labor also fail to adequately fill staffing needs due to a lack of worker motivation. Certain shifts are less desirable to employees, due to the shift's length or the time of day in which it is scheduled. Other shifts simply occur at difficult times of the year, such as shifts that span holidays. Due to the failure of prior art staffing methods, many such shifts go under staffed. A scheduling method and system are needed that provide sufficient incentives to fill these shifts without putting a strain on the employer's staffing budget.
Staffing non-routine labor is difficult enough without having to be concerned with the accreditation of the staff being scheduled. A manual system makes tracking accreditation nearly impossible for large pools of workers, let alone for industries that require more than one type of licensure or certification for each worker on staff. Accordingly, a need exists for a system that can track the accreditation of a pool of workers as it schedules the pool for an employer and prevents the scheduling of an unqualified worker.